The God of the Sun
by ActeonsSphinx
Summary: Just something I'm using as writing practise based loosely on a nuzlocke. Consider the setting about 5-6 months after the events of the G/S/C games. A mix of created characters and existing - Giovanni, probably the E4 and Gym leaders. Maybe others will make an appearance. Triggers: violence & gore, occasional strong language, maybe some sexual overtones (I dunno)
1. Chapter 1

1

Woodsmoke-scented air fingered in through cracks in the old tower's walls. The man stood in the empty ruins of the destroyed tower and tasted the breeze; the smell of leaves turning crisp on the trees outside, inside nothing but dust and an ancient hint of smoulder which was perhaps only part of his imagination.

Outside, his men kept up a low murmuring. Ecruteak was an unknown town to them, to all of them, and yet from the first Giovanni could not help but be charmed by its old worldliness, its quiet spirit and feeling of a slow, private trickle of time which was so very different to the rapidly changing habitat of his home region. Everything he knew so far of Johto was concentrated and gathered in this burnt, dusty hall where autumnal sunlight fell in shafts on rotting wooden beams.

He gathered his long coat about him and looked at the floor. A century of dirt, perhaps more - the Elders weren't yet willing to be more open about their town's history to them but they would be - and dampened ash coated the ground along with insect husks and miscellaneous debris. A scuffle of rattata footprints and pidgey feathers. Old nests. Droppings. He snorted very lightly; just as he'd expected, no human had come in this building for a long time. The reports of his splinter group were proving false. Those followers had left a story of fantastical beasts awakening beneath the Burned Tower's foundations and running like the very wind around the area, searching for something, but this, as he had now discovered, was only a rehash of a popular legend and a pale excuse for their failure.

That group had supposed to be a vanguard of sorts, placekeepers to settle in Johto before he had finished back home. Their job was to prepare the way for Giovanni. Through lack of communication or simple hunger for power, they had instead made several abortive moves which achieved nothing except to ensure that the Rocket name was anathema before Giovanni himself could even leave Kanto.

Well. It was not a lost cause. He paced along the warped floorboards, feeling more than hearing the boom of emptiness beneath them. Back in the far shadows was a tilted statue of a open-winged bird. He angled his own head at it.

Johto's insistence on clinging onto its past hobbled its ability to defend itself against those that wished to strike at its very heart. The question was, what would Giovanni get out of disturbing its peace? Would a leader, having taken control of the region, gather beneath him something great or only a collection of burned ruins?

Leaving the skeletal tower, he passed the shrine at the entrance, which was as far as any visitor normally went. The breeze of his movement set the gentle candle flames guttering. 

There had been no joy in his latest; he had come across the woman and before his mind had even computed the information, his knife was out and slipped between her ribs, into the lung. She only looked at him in surprise as he tugged it free and stuck it in again nearer her heart.

She went down with a bubbling gasp and he smashed her head open with a rock his arms trembled to hold.

Afterwards, he sat next to the ruins of her body and looked out at the windswept crags of the Hoenn badlands.

He hadn't seen another human for close to two weeks and he was angry at her for breaking this solitude. He was out in search of an ending; any ending, in death or a change. He had been close to it but this she… He looked at the caved in skull, the rictus of teeth. Soil coated his bloody fingers.

He wished he could have enjoyed it; drawn it out as he used to. But there had only been the raw edge of need pricking him into an animalistic attack that had achieved nothing, fulfilled nothing within him. When he laid a hand on her chest to take back his knife, he felt the muscles twitching with the last electric impulses of the dead.

He was wiping his hair off his forehead when the screeching began. It was a horrible, grinding noise like the sound of a rusty blade on steel or old machinery grinding together. He looked at the sky, the far horizon, the body beside him but nothing accounted for it. He plugged an ear with his dirty finger.

The bellowing creature was caught between two rocks at the bottom of the outcrop he'd been standing upon. It looked as though a boulder had fallen onto it and crushed it against another rock. The ground around it was scarred with the scraping of its claws and its voice sounded parched; it had been there some while.

His legs trembled as he knelt. The beast was perhaps four foot long, squat and sturdy, covered in thick, overlapping plates of some sort of rust-covered metal. Its shape and the configuration of its cocked head poked at his memory; he had seen something like it before - yes, a showcase battle outside of Mauville. They called it a Lairon.

No matter. He stepped away and its screaming went up another octave. One hoary yellow eye stared at him resentfully.

He shushed it with a finger but seeing him leave, it struggled against the rock, grinding the crushed armour plates of its sides together.

"Be quiet," he croaked. He wasn't sure if it understood, but it did quieten when he came back. It cries might attract someone and although the badlands were an endless, uncrossable expanse separating Hoenn and Johto, he had come across the woman, hadn't he? Who knew who else could be within hearing distance.

He reached out to the rough surface of its armor with his blood-gummed knife and tried to slip it in between the plates into the leathery black skin above its heart. But its armour overlapped too completely; there was no room for the blade.

In through the eye, then. It shut its eyelid against him and managed to slam its heavy snout into his stomach.

He flew onto his backside. The creature screeched at him and wriggled more urgently from its prison.

"Shit," he muttered, crawling back up to the woman. She'd had a bag which he tore from her back after kicking over her body. Surely she hadn't come into such a place without weapons? Throwing nervous glances over his shoulder, he pulled out her belongings; a set of black clothes, packets of dried food, a leaking water bottle, randoms cards, keys and paper. His hand closed on a set of round objects; an opened sixpack of new pokeballs, five still sat glossy under the plastic wrap. There was nothing else; she hadn't packed for a hike but he didn't realise this until later. All he wanted at that moment was a way to shut the creature up.

He slid more than walked back down to it in a cloud of dust. It lowered its head and rumbled deep in its chest at him. He had never used one before but his finger found the smooth metal button on the ball. It opened with a flash of light and the creature seemed to dissolve into it, leaving a broken gap between the rocks and a slight feeling of heaviness in his hand. The pokeball vibrated strongly for a moment before falling still. Silence swept into the break.

Later, with the woman's supplies on his own back, he watched the sun disappear in a bright smear of orange beneath the ochre horizon. Badland nights were achingly cold but he was almost used to them now. A faint phosphorescent in the sky marked the lights of somewhere - Hoenn or Johto or some other place, he didn't know as he had lost his direction. It didn't matter, he wouldn't last much longer. The newly-occupied pokeball slid easily into his pocket.


	2. Chapter 2

2

The bowels of an unused warehouse served as the interview stage for new recruits. Seventeen potential grunts stood in a line, their pokemon beside them. It was a cold, late-Autumnal evening and more than one trainer was holding back shivers. An-lu made a note of this next to their names.

She didn't particularly enjoy the recruitment process; within the organisation, it was referred to as 'picking the fodder' and most if not all of the candidates would be rough, unitelligent thugs whose very lack of drive was what had drawn them towards the easy rewards the Rockets offered.

However, they were needed. With an organisation now halved between Johto and Kanto, the Rockets needed to fill out their ranks again and who better than the local bullies who, if nothing else, could at least offer some intelligence about the region?

An-lu's partner for the day, a meathead who called himself Jock, patrolled the line of candidates, trying to intimidate them with his glowering. Another three nameless grunts, conscious of their uniforms and newly brought in from Ecruteak, hung about the door.

"Alright," she said, startling Jock out of his staring. The teenager he'd been frowning at snorted. "We're going to have you pair up and battle. One-on-one and keep it within ten feet."

She pointed at each candidate and their partner and sent them off into their own space. Of course, the fair thing to do would have been to match them by their strength, but An-lu had not been made an under-exec because of her fairness.

The youngest boy with the scrawny rattata, for example, she gave to the street rough with his towering rhyperior. The rattata had no chance of winning and the boy himself looked much too pathetic to ever be of use to them but she wished to see how merciless the rough could be. Of all of them, he seemed the most promising.

She also set the punky-looking girl's bellossom against the donphan of the young man who had been eyeing her with great interest all afternoon. The girl clearly had no intentions towards him and stood with her hands planted firmly on her hips, booted legs apart. She sent her bellossom diving towards its opponent in a hurricane of slicing petals without a single word to him.

The male trainer, who was dressed in some semblance of a motorcycle gang with a leather jacket and gelled hair, swore as a stray petal opened a thin cut on his cheek.

"Fuck… roll out!" he called. His donphan stumbled over its own trunk.

"Sunny day," the girl commanded, tossing a pigtail back over her shoulder. "Solarbeam!"

Her bellossom spun into a burst of light and beautifully executed an immediate follow up attack, drowning the enemy donphan in such a bright beam that everyone turned from their own battles and shielded their eyes against it.

An-lu held her clipboard against her chest and clapped. The donphan was down without ever having moved, its trainer crouched over it, trying to get it back to its feet. The girl smiled almost demurely at An-lu.

"Tremendous," An-lu said. "Take a break for a moment. We'll put you up against someone else when they're done."

The girl gathered her bellossom up into her arms and watched the rest of the battles from a place against a wall, a cigarette sticking out of her mouth.

An-lu strolled over to the trainer with the rhyperior. The beast stood over 7 foot tall and had been calmly allowing the rattata to batter itself against its rock-hard armour while its owner looked away, bored. The rattata's owner was red in the face, shouting through tearful frustration.

Seeing An-lu watching, the older man concentrated more fully on the battle. "'Perior, headbutt."

The rhyperior lowered its head to meet the rattata's latest attack, who leapt towards its throat but instead rebounded off its iron-like skull and fell some distance away. An-lu heard its pained squeak.

The rhyperior's trainer was looking at her.

"Finish it," she said.

He blinked at his open-mouthed opponent and then his own pokemon, who had turned back to look at him. And then he shrugged. "Stomp."

The rhyperior raised its giant leg and brought it down firmly on the rattata as its young trainer threw himself forward. He was only just too slow; the rattata's body cracked wetly as he tried to pry his fingers underneath the rhyperior's foot to lift it up. An-lu had to call one of the grunts over to pull away the sobbing boy, a slight smile curling her thin lips. The rhyperior ground its opponent's remains into the ground.

She called a halt on another battle as a koffing sprayed out a cloud of noxious gas which then had to be flapped safely away from the other trainers by Jock's golbat. She inclined her head at him in a signal to get rid of the koffing's trainer, who had been too stupid to realise that poison gas was not a good move to use indoors.

One of the other female trainers appeared to be having problems with her half-evolved espeon. The girl looked to be in her mid-twenties and was tall but slim in a slightly awkward, coltish way with a curtain of light-blonde hair falling down her back. Her espeon had the opponent's ekans suspended in midair, weaving frantic figure-eights with its coils as it tried to escape.

The espeon was still growing out its ears and losing its thick, eevee's neck ruff but the gem on its forehead was glowing. An-lu vaguely recalled that that was the first thing an evolving espeon developed. Otherwise, its coat was an odd, murky shade somewhere between beige and lavender.

"Problems?" she asked, letting sarcasm tinge her voice.

The girl blushed. "N-no, she's just - uh, psybeam!"

The espeon twitched an ear at her.

"What are you doing?" Her opponent shouted. "Fight properly!"

The espeon looked at him and blinked slowly. The ekans hissed and spat.

The girl pulled in exasperation at her hair. "Espeon, c'mon!"

The was another crack, this one much sharper and louder than that of the rattata's, and the ekans went limp. The espeon dropped it to the floor and padded back over to its trainer, where it sat on its hindquarters and licked a forepaw.

Despite herself, An-lu was impressed. She had seen years of recruitment and had an eye for certain trainers. In this one she saw potential. Espeon were, by nature, inclined to not to battle outright; they confused their enemies and walked away. But here was one young enough to still have fighting spirit and here, too, was a trainer who was inexperienced and easy to mold. She would never rise far in their ranks but she did have a great capacity for guidance.

Once the battles were finished, An-lu had decided on those she would keep. The espeon's trainer was among them, as was the man with the rhyperior and the girl who had impressed her so against the donphan.

Those that would not be joining their organisation were paid off, as in the case of the ekan's trainer, or discretely told to move along like the rattata's. An-lu was good at her job; she always knew when to offer a carrot or wield the stick.


End file.
